The film begins inside a box of Kodak Ektachrome slides. The box has my name written on it. Inside, the snow-capped peaks of the Zagros mountains rise up behind a big, glass-fronted house in north Tehran. Looking at this image I remember a pair of pale yellow flip-flops bobbing up and down on the surface of the kidney-shaped swimming pool. My father had jumped in to fish Azar out of the pool because she’d fallen in at the deep end, fully dressed, and couldn’t swim.

Or so the story went. Azar was the nanny who’d looked after me, and was married to Mohammad, the head servant. I don’t think I actually witnessed Azar’s rescue, and on reflection, I am not sure that I ever saw the yellow flip-flops floating on the water, either. This may be just one of those stories told within a family that gain solidity with each retelling, and whose imagery lives on in memory long after all of the protagonists and witnesses are gone.

I find no images of Tehran itself in the box, nor of any urban life beyond this cool, suburban idyl. But by now I am curious about the troubling story behind these records of a colonial encounter which I find myself bound up in.

The house where we lived in north Tehran, early 1960s. Photograph: Miranda Pennell

A year later I’m in the BP archive at Warwick University, looking for, and failing to find, images of oil workers in Iran. Despite the profusion of materials, the repertoire of imagery is limited, with the same themes reccurring in different albums, at different points in time.

How does one read between the lines of a photograph? What might an image betray?

Aerial photograph taken in 1936 by Hunting Aerosurveys of Bond Street for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Still from film. Photograph: Miranda Pennell

The first remains I unearth consist of a special form of representation that reduced the world to a series of geometric patterns. Both aerial and panoramic photographs measure, plot and reconstruct whole territories in such a way that human beings disappear altogether, while vast mountains and desertscapes reveal their hidden sub-structure, a stratified history of several millennia.

In these images, pipelines, giant containers and other industrial infrastructure stand out like monumental effigies designed for the visual gratification of some airborne deity, or presumably, those figures sat around some boardroom at the centre of power, in London.

I know that these are only representations, illusions made from traces of silver on paper. But as I continue to search, my suspicions are confirmed that the imperial beings that rule over the globe are able to do so because in fashioning these paper doubles of the world, they conjure the power to reshape the original. The archive did not simply register, it produced the world it described, measured and named.

Aerial photographs of Iran taken in 1947 by Hunting Aerosurveys of Bond Street for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Still from film. Photograph: Miranda Pennell

Suddenly, figures inside a tiny snapshot reach out and grab me. From within an archive seemingly devoid of images of physical labour, these are lively images. They are from a personal album of a British engineer in the late 1930s. Figures are strung like a row of beads along a long, taught rope - they are hoisting a gigantic tank into position.

In another picture, the same workers present themselves to camera. They address me with an immediacy that cuts across time and means that I cannot forget them. They will not allow me to turn the page. When I magnify a third image, this one from Abadan, southern Iran, at around the same period, I am taken aback as each of the vivid faces of a group of workers stares back. Each one appears haunted, and now I have seen them, so I am too.

From the 1940s on, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was subject to open expressions of discontent, strikes and critisism from international labour organisations. The photographs now are staged, and we witness the shaping of an image and a narrative in which the actors appear unconvinced by their own performance. In retospect, it’s a wonder that the tales of happy children playing on British-built estates, primitive amazement at processed tinned food and other western technologies, can have persuaded anyone of their veracity.

The ‘Persia in Perspective’ series from around 1950 reproduces the twin-image of the primitive and the modern through a cycle of photographs prefaced with an introduction ‘For the Common Good’. I read the captions. Caption 21: ‘Since biblical times wooden ploughs have scratched the surface of the desert.’ Caption 20: ‘These young boys stare in amazement at the wonders of a modern age, as they watch a British combine harvester at work.’ And caption 18: ‘A large variety of clean imported food is available in these modern stores’.

At the end of my search in the BP archive, I return to my family photographs, which are mainly taken up with visits to ancient ruins and villages. My mother is seated on a horse-drawn harvester. She is looking at women washing pots at a dried-up spring. She watches women spinning and weaving. In the 1970s my mother will buy an identical wool-spinning device from a shop in London, and she will build herself a small loom, from a kit.

I had initially been disapointed by the lack of photographs showing the working and social life of BP staff. But as I look again, I reflect on the appeal of nostalgia, that longing to capture an image of the past, an ancient ruin, a primitive technology. Nostaglia seduces because it is one half of the double bind of modernity and of those who consider themselves modern, we who cannot resist the urge to measure how far forward and how irreversably we have advanced along the single-gauge track of progress. Afterall, everyone loves a ruin, and everyone prefers the ancient past to the recent past, don’t they?

Images for The Host have been sourced courtesy of the BP archive and from Pennell family photographs. The Tehran Bureau is an independent media organisation, hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau